NANO Nuclear, James, it's a pleasure to have you. I know Jay couldn't make it. Everyone, this is the number one performing IPO in 2024. If it were me, I would say in five years, this is going to be a massive defense contractor akin to General Atomics. They are doing so much in the defense space, so much in the nuclear space. If you have any technical questions, James is the guy to ask. It's my pleasure to introduce Mr. James Walker, CEO of NANO Nuclear.
Is an engaging way to open the door of communication. Email wecare@sequire.com to learn more and get a demo.
Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for showing up. I'd like to just take you a bit through the company, how we got started, the sort of different areas we're involved in currently, a bit about the tech.
It's hard to hear you.
Yeah, no problem. How does that sound? Better? Okay, great. Just in case you didn't hear, I'll just walk you a bit about, through the company, what we do, the different areas we're involved in, a bit how we got started. There's a bit of background. We are, we began as a microreactor company. If you don't know what a microreactor is, it's typically a nuclear reactor that is under about 20 megawatt electric output. We targeted that for certain reasons that I'll go into within the nuclear industry. What ended up happening is we were developing our microreactors, and we were looking at how these things would actually be manufactured, constructed, deployed. That pushed us into a lot of areas out of necessity just to de-risk the business, to ensure that we could actually produce these things.
That was necessary really out of the fact that there was a lot of infrastructure atrophy within the U.S., capability to manufacture fuel was not there, ability to move the fuel, and that pushed us into things like fuel re, fuel processing, nuclear fuel transportation, and consultancy services. I'll go a little bit into each of those main four business areas. How we began is when we knew nuclear was going to take off, and we knew that principally because money was moving away from things like renewables, wind, solar, stocks were losing value, and it was moving into nuclear. We knew the industry was going to take off. There were a variety of reasons why we knew that. I'll discuss those a bit later. We were looking for a place within nuclear to where we could fit.
We, we within the nuclear space, small modular reactors, they were very well developed. There was a lot of advancement by a number of companies in that area, but the area that had fewer competitors: concrete construction crews, and maintenance crews and operational crews as well. These, these had to be largely remotely operated systems that were just output power. We had two technical teams. We drew the first one from University of California, Berkeley professors and engineers there.
They brought in a lot of their technical teams and contractors and consultants, and they came up with the ZEUS reactor, and their solution here was just to remove the primary coolant completely out of the reactor to simplify the reactor as much as possible, fewer moving parts, fewer things that could go wrong, and more inherent safety too, because you have a solid core that can't melt down. Obviously, with a large reactor system, the conventional ones we're all used to, that's the worst sort of accident scenario. A lot of these advanced reactor systems don't have those kind of accident scenarios. They just, even if you were to blow them up with a missile, they would actually get less reactive because you would separate the uranium out, and the fuel and the reactor core can't melt.
We had another reactor system just to de-risk the business, the ODIN reactor system. This was built by professors and engineers out of University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Centre. Their solution to this was to use very high-tier level components, licensed fuels. They'd been involved in a lot of working groups that were examining why reactors don't go to market. They just stay paper reactors. They'd used a lot of the learning to inform their design there. The intention here was to be able to create a reactor that could be mass manufactured cheaply. The components they were using, the coolants, the fuels, these sort of things were as inexpensive as they could make them so we could ensure that the reactor systems could be, hopefully, 3D printed. They'd be very simple devices and then deployed very easily.
Again, low operating temperature, low pressure. They remain an incredibly simple device, which is ultimately what you need with a microreactor. What ended up happening is we were developing these systems and we were growing. An opportunity came up when a company called USNC went into Chapter 11 and they had certain assets that, you know, we really liked. The reason why we liked them is that they were a much, much larger output power, but it was a very well-developed design. This gave us a chance to actually pull out into joint lead with the other developers and to develop larger systems. The KRONOS reactor is a subterranean system, about three floors deep, but it is as big as you can possibly make a reactor before it stops being a modular system.
What I mean by that is that you can mass manufacture all the components, things like reactor vessels, in a manufacturing location, a centralized location, and distribute them out. If you go larger than this system, then you would need more site work, like making the reactor vessel, which is going to be your largest component. You would need to make that actually at the site. Then you end up in a situation where you have individual site construction work as opposed to sort of a modular assembly. There is a video at the end, actually, I'll show you about how these, you just bring these ISO containers in and they slot together, but it is a much larger system, much more powerful. It is designed essentially to be one of many.
There was a contract USNC had with a big data center before they went in Chapter 11 to deploy 50 to one site. The turbine system, the conversion of the energy, all of that, you know, you could have 10 reactors feeding one of those. That is the idea. You do bring the cost of electricity right down, you know, upfront. If you were deploying one of these, it would not be very economic. I mean, you would be looking at, I do not know, $0.03-$0.04 per kWh . If you had a tenth of a kind, then you bring it right down to be more competitive, maybe, you know, $0.04-$0.05 , something like that. We have had to obviously get into those numbers with our financial planners a lot more as we sophisticate these reactors.
The good part here is that it's a very sophisticated design. We're going to start on some, we have a contract with UIUC, University of Illinois, to start the construction of this reactor almost imminently. We've just signed that and we're going to start the drilling work to do the geological characterization of the land this year. Then we'll put in for the permit to construct sometime this year as well with the NRC and get going. We also are going to be constructing up at Chalk River, in Ontario, Canada, the same reactor system so we can license this reactor at the same time. The Canadian government. The other reactor we bought from the USNC bankruptcy was the LOKI reactor. It's almost like a scaled down KRONOS reactor, similar fuel types, high temperature gas reactor.
It was also designed to be a microreactor. I think it's very likely what we'll be doing in the future because we don't want to develop four reactors. The principal amount of our investment will go into the KRONOS reactor because it's the most advanced and can be deployed to market the fastest. Things like LOKI might feed into a strategy to merge the reactor with ODIN, so you can take the benefits of both reactor systems and carry that forward. That might be the second reactor we develop after KRONOS, which we will push the hardest.
When we were obviously looking at building all these reactor systems, one crucial thing we realized very early in the development of these systems is that the fuel was not, or the fuel supply chain was not actually there to mass manufacture the fuel our reactor systems needed. This was not just true for us. This was true for everybody, everybody who was developing a small modular reactor or microreactor. This caused us some considerable concern. You know, even the big companies that were involved in things like enrichment, Centrus, Orano, these sort of groups, we were not sure of their timelines. They were working towards this sort of stuff, but they needed a substantial amount of investment. Centrifuge plants can cost $5 billion. They did not have that kind of money.
They, you know, from actually meeting with them and discussing things with them, we weren't sure of their timeline. We began to investigate how we de-risk this supply chain for ourselves. Originally we looked at building our own fuel fabrication facility for non-TRISO HALEU fuel. It would have been its only one of its kind in the country. Because we were taking these initiatives, the Department of Energy made us one of the founding members of the HALEU consortium. Through that network, we actually began to meet and get form closer relationships with enrichment companies. That led to a partnership with a company called LIS Technologies. It had originally been a Cameco funded venture in the nineties.
Again, because of that cheap Russian fuel, Cameco had discontinued the development work and principally because it could just buy fuel cheaper than investing the money into the next phase of development. We bought out the patents, the technology, and brought the people in, and we incubated LIS in our Tennessee offices and invested into them. NANO is a shareholder of LIS, but it's inevitably so that they can ensure that there will be a supply of uranium that we can draw directly from, and we have this partnership in place. It should actually be a revenue generating business for both LIS and NANO prior to even the reactors going out because, you know, by logical necessity, you've got to produce the fuel before you can mass produce the reactor systems.
There were other opportunities that came up as we were developing the reactor systems. We realized that the transportation element was a very big concern, moving yellowcake, moving enriched fuel, moving uranium hexafluoride, tetrafluoride, moving spent fuel. All of these different elements meant that we were going to be very reliant on a very, a strained, already strained supply chain with few suppliers. We began buying technology from the Department of Energy that had been developed by the national labs and actually bring in some former executives of UPS to help us examine how we could link up all the different businesses. We are trying to identify currently a few acquisitions within the space just to give us a footprint that we can begin building now within that area. It is going to be a very important element.
You can, if you have a reactor, but you can't deploy it, you can't move the fuel, you don't have a reactor system that can go out to customers. The transportation element is that, which is a highly regulated industry, very specialized, is something we're going to be involved in sooner. As we were developing these expertise as well, we received a lot of demand from people who were interested in consultancy services. We're establishing a consultancy business at the moment just to sort of vending these projects into. We'll be doing that in partnership with already existing service providers. The good part here is obviously just like the transportation, we expect this to put us into early revenue in the company and we'll grow out these services and provide them.
You know, this will be a small part of the business, I think, until the fuel business becomes online, as does the reactor systems. We, I mentioned, LIS Technologies a bit earlier. We bought a big building down in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, sort of the nuclear hub of the nuclear industry at the moment, especially the resurgent and growing industry. We sectioned off the bottom floor for LIS Technologies. It's going to be a very, it's going to be a classified technology. So all those windows are now being removed currently and the laboratories are being put in. We have the top floor there and we've moved a lot of our engineers in there as they. We'll be able to develop some of the tech here and then we'll move to things like pilot plants.
We're not exactly, we, we're entertaining a few locations currently of where we'll upgrade to. We have this facility as well as we're going to be buying some additional buildings in the Chicago area as well. We can fill it with engineers and we, we're recruiting quite fairly fast at the moment because with the acquisition of KRONOS and the imminent construction that we're expecting with these reactor systems, we've got to build up the teams relatively quickly at a time when everyone's trying to get hold of nuclear engineers. It is an issue because they are in short supply. It takes a long time to train them. We should be increasing our numbers by about 30-40 people over the next year.
We do have another facility up in upstate New York that we're using at the moment to fabricate non-nuclear components, things like pumps, models. That way you can subject them to stress testing, heat testing, and those kinds of things as well. We've developed a number of technologies to enable our reactors to work that we put IP around. A want to highlight is like the ALIP. I think there might be a slide on that. Yeah. The ALIP project as well, which I imagine will be quite useful to most advanced reactor developers, principally because it can move things like salts, leads around reactors using a magnetic system, which removes the pumps. If you can remove the pumps, you can remove the complexity of the reactor. You can shrink it right down.
And, you know, when you are making small systems, the smaller you can make them, the better. These are the sort of things that we're testing at the moment right up at the upstate New York facility. These are technologies as well. We'll probably license out, so it'll be an additional line of revenue that will come in, but these will be very beneficial for our own systems as well. I mentioned LIS Technologies. They were Cameco backed and they already had very good results, which is obviously why we invested into them. We were one of the award winners of a DOE grant last year. There was a $3.4 billion LEU IDIQ. We were one of six winners there. Also, of the six, there was Centrus, Orano, Urenco, I think General Atomics, and there was us as well.
It was set up principally to try and address the atrophied infrastructure that I mentioned, so the U.S. could have the domestic capability to produce fuel again. We have made a commitment to LIS that we would help them with the conversion side of the equation as well as the deconversion and fabrication. These are, particularly something like conversion is something outside of our area of expertise, but we would be able to bring in partners to help with things like balance of plant operation of the facilities just to invest in those kinds of areas as well, so we can complete that supply chain. It's very likely we'll probably partner with some of the big companies, I think, on this as well, because it's a very substantial undertaking.
It needs a lot of expertise and, you know, historic operational expertise is invaluable when it comes to this sort of thing. But LIS are making incredible progress at the moment, and, you know, they might be one of the first actually domestically to produce this fuel, especially considering that, because of the laser enrichment, the capital requirement to produce a laser enrichment facility is a tenth of what it would be for a centrifuge facility. There have been a number of good partnerships we've established along the way. I mean, we're very agreeable to collaborate with anybody really. I mean, that's principally how we're going to get this to succeed. There's Curio that's inserted in there too. Obviously we are interested in a full supply chain, which will also include how we reprocess the fuel in the future.
That's currently not allowed for, but there are, from speaking to government and I was in DC yesterday, there are moves underway to examine how this could be done. If you consider that the burnup of fuel within a reactor system is 1%, 2%, and 97% of it might not be used up at all, you can see that it would be incredibly beneficial if we could recover a lot of that fuel from, and that would include all the spent fuel that's ever been generated in the U.S. Like most of it is decent fuel that could power the country for hundreds of years. It doesn't need to be mined or enriched or anything. It just needs to be reprocessed. With that, I'll jump ahead a little bit. We are fairly well supported. We've got some very good people within us.
Scott, when he introduced me, said we had some very good conversations we were having currently with the military, defense industrial unit, DIU, Marines, Army, Air Force. They have interest in reactor systems at their military bases as well as a vested interest obviously in getting the capability built back so we could actually manufacture the fuel within the country. A few of the people within our board, Four-Star General Wesley Clark, retired Lieutenant General Terry Robling from the Marines, obviously they've been contributing to help us along and establish those military contracts. We've even got former New York Governor there, Andrew Cuomo, I think, and I think he's running for that. He'll probably win that, obviously. Just given that there's only a couple of minutes left, I'll turn it around for any questions that might be remaining. Okay. Yep.
Considering the ramp in your personnel, how are you set up for capital? Capital at the moment, we've banked, I think since we IPO'd in May, we raised about $130 million, $130 million. I think after the acquisitions we made of USNC, I think we've got about $110 million-$115 million just banked. There's obviously been tremendous interest in the stock. It's performed very well. There was an opportunity very recently to bank some more money, but we just didn't take it because we wanted to get a bit more development out there. The banking becomes our ability to bank with any bank we want, frees up in about May, June. The intention there was just to get to that point and then probably some sort of ATM or something like that that we'll use. Yep.
Who are the major shareholders? I would say the major shareholders in this, some of the former executives of UPS who've been involved from the beginning, they're big ones. The President of the company, Yu, is a big shareholder. I think I'm on the list, but I'm probably somewhere around about 10th. Other big shareholders, there was a Forbes billionaire that was involved right at the start. He was a very big shareholder, but it's principally retail. Like, there's over 90,000 shareholders now. We steered clear of venture funds just so we could keep more control over the company. That's principally when we went around the banks and everything like that, we were raising from retail mostly. All right. We are officially out of time.
You guys have any additional questions, if we could take those outside. Thank you so much. Thank you.